“All right,” repeated Mother. “And now get to bed, Jay,” she added automatically. “It’s far too late for you to be awake.”
Chapter 9
I know two ways to make time stretch forever.
One is to go somewhere you have never been before, and do a hundred new and interesting things. After two days you think you have been away for ages, and you just can’t believe that so little time has passed since you left home.
The other way is to be waiting for something, waiting and waiting and waiting, and not able to speed up its arrival at all.
That’s what happened to me in the two weeks after Doctor Eileen declared that we were going off to space to take a look at Paddy’s Fortune. While others did the interesting work I had to stay home, helping Mother and keeping my eyes open for the possible return of the violent strangers.
That danger seemed to lessen toward the end of the first week. Since Paddy Enderton had left no one to inherit any of his possessions, Mother and Doctor Eileen arranged for them to be taken over to Skibbereen and sold at auction. The proceeds would go to pay for Enderton’s burial and the repair of our damaged property.
As it turned out we didn’t get a penny toward either one. Before the auction could take place, the storage place in Skibbereen was broken into and everything was stolen. Mother seemed to think that this was a good thing, because it made us a less attractive target.
Another dull week followed. Duncan West, who knew far too much to be treated as an outsider, had been sent over to Muldoon. Sworn to secrecy, he was negotiating for a ship and crew. It wasn’t likely to be easy, with crews scattered all over after Winterfall. Doctor Eileen was back on her rounds, quietly arranging for a physician from the north end of Lake Sheelin to serve as her substitute while she was away. She was also busy with something else that I didn’t find out about until later.
She dropped in on us every couple of days, but the only visit of interest was when she gave me what she called a Maze Ephemeris. It contained names of worldlets and sets of numbers called orbital elements, six of them for each place.
Comparing her list and Paddy Enderton’s calculator/recorder/display and who-knew-what-else unit, I was able to relate the two sets of numbers to each other. They did not quite match, but Doctor Eileen said that the difference was just that one set was centered on Maveen itself, and the other on what she called “the whole Maveen system center of mass.”
I was also able to match most of the names on Doctor Eileen’s place list to items on the calculator display, and vice versa. Paddy’s Fortune was not on her list, but she said that was not surprising. There were far more worldlets in the Maze than anyone had ever surveyed, and small bodies in particular were liable to be left out. I didn’t know at the time what she meant by “small,” and I was astonished to learn that anything less than a mile or two across—the full distance from our house to Toltoona, and more—was unlikely to be on anyone’s list. For the first time I began to develop a feel for the vast region covered by the Forty Worlds.
One fine, calm day, when there was no breath of wind and the temperature was above freezing, I ventured again to the top of the water tower. In four nerve-tingling trips I brought down the telecon, and demonstrated it to Doctor Eileen on her next visit. She said that it was more evidence of a technology no longer possessed anywhere in the Forty Worlds, but she could see no way to relate it directly to Paddy’s Fortune, and she did not even take it away with her.
I put it up in the front bedroom, my bedroom again, and used it to stare every day across the lake at Muldoon Spaceport. The facility was very quiet. I saw only two launches in a week. Most of the rest of the time, when Mother did not have me running around helping her—I think she deliberately kept me busy—I sat upstairs playing with the calculator.
It was soon obvious that it was capable of many more things than I could understand. At the simplest level, I could point to one of the worlds of the Maze and obtain more and more detail simply by calling for “Second Data Level,” “Third Data Level,” and so on. The trouble was, most of what I was shown seemed useless. There were listings of object composition (that’s what I had looked at and not understood the first time I used it); there were things called “delta-vee” lists, that told how easy or hard it was for a ship to get from any world to any other at a chosen time. And finally, at the most detailed level of all, the complete set of data acquired by any visit to or survey of the object was included. For a prospector, or anyone hoping to scavenge the Maze, the whole collection of data could be priceless.
For us, though, it was useless. We were going to Paddy’s Fortune and only to Paddy’s Fortune. But I did wonder if we had missed the point. Perhaps the men who had broken into our house were interested in data about the known worldlets of the Maze. Or perhaps they wanted something completely different, something we had not thought about.
I had spent a lot more time with Paddy Enderton than had either Mother or Doctor Eileen. He was rough and tough and dirty, but he was also practical. He had never mentioned the stars or the Godspeed Drive to me, not once. No matter what Doctor Eileen might believe, try as I might I could not see him as a person who would care one jot about the existence of Godspeed Base, or the long-term future of human beings on Erin. If he called a place Paddy’s Fortune, that’s what he would expect to find there: something to make him rich.
Before I had time to worry about that, a thousand things happened at once. Time began to stretch in the other way, with so much going on that I have trouble remembering what came when.
It began when Doctor Eileen came to the house, late one evening. She had heard from Duncan West. He had located and hired a ship, the Cuchulain, complete with crew, and was now busy arranging for supplies to be ferried up to it from Muldoon. He needed help, and he told Doctor Eileen that I could join him as soon as I was ready.
I was ready that minute, and said as much. Mother stayed up half the night, making me a spacer’s jacket and trousers of dark blue, and first thing the next morning she zipped me over to Toltoona in Doctor Eileen’s cruiser. They loaded me and my little bag on board a ground transport to Muldoon. I thought for a horrible moment that Mother was going to hug me in front of the other passengers, but she didn’t.
Muldoon Port was a steady four-hour run around the bottom end of Lake Sheelin. I spent the whole trip in a hot glow of anticipation. Every previous time at Muldoon Port, I had been an interloper. Now I was going in as an honest-to-goodness spacer.
At the dropoff point inside the port I slung my bag over my shoulder and strolled the long way round to the cargo staging area where I was supposed to find Uncle Duncan. I wanted to see everything, and I wanted everyone to see me. It seemed a pity that the port was in its winter quiet.
In fact, I don’t think anyone noticed me at all. And my grand arrival at Duncan West’s side in the staging area was an anticlimax.
He didn’t even say hello. He just nodded at me and went on talking to a big-boned, lantern-jawed man with carroty-red hair and a scrubbed-clean red face, who glared at me, said nothing, and kept on shaking his head.
“That’s where the money is coming from.” Uncle Duncan never raised his voice, ever, but today he did seem more intense than usual. I had the feeling that an argument had been going on for some time. “I have no stake in this, so I have no authority to change the deal. But remember the golden rule: The one with the gold gets to make the rules.”